6th. Sunday of Year (B) 2021
(Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46;
First Corinthians 10:31-11:1; Mark 1:40-45)
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The teaching contained in our first reading reminds us forcefully
that the physical and spiritual good of society as a whole, has unquestioned
priority over individual ‘rights’.
Likewise, in our second reading: the individual should, first and
foremost, endeavour to serve God, the Church, and the peaceful well-being of
society:
Do everything for the glory of God, avoid giving offence.
From those two very diverse readings we may perhaps have already
glimpsed something of what is a fundamental characteristic of any God-fearing,
committed Catholic and Christian human-being: namely, a deep-seated,
soul-satisfying, natural desire and, indeed, quasi moral imperative, to give
oneself to something greater than self – not just to family, to team, or even
to country – but to some great good, indeed, to the Personal Good Whom
we in Jesus are blessed and sublimely privileged to know as God, our
Father. To what degree that longing develops in the course of our life
depends first of all, on our recognition and acceptance of its presence in our
mind and heart, and then on our correspondence to the demands it makes, of
necessity, upon us individually.
Holy Mass is the supreme offering mankind can make to God in and through
His beloved and only-begotten Son, Who -- being God incarnate, that is, both
perfect God and perfect man -- seeks to draw us to Himself in order that He might then be able to draw us with Himself to the God Who sent
Him, His Father, Who wants us to become, in and through Jesus, His own true
children.
Jesus still – to this very day – helps us to make this ‘Holy Mass
offering’ to His Father first of all, by His words and His teaching: therefore,
the first part of the Mass consisting wholly of prayers, readings from Jesus’
Scriptures -- all of what is called the Old Testament speaks of Jesus -- and
the Creed:
Jesus said to them, “These are My words that I spoke to you while I was
still with you, that everything written about Me in the law of Moses and in the
prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.” (Luke 24:44)
If you had believed Moses, you would have believed Me, because he wrote
about Me. (John 5:46)
Mother Church does this that we might thereby be inspired and
enabled to participate more intimately and fully with Jesus in His own sacrificial
commitment to His Father and Personal presence for us, on the altar
and in our hearts, which is the ultimate purpose and sublime promise of the
Mass.
People of God, do strive, pray earnestly, to understand and take to
heart the teaching presented in the Liturgy of the Word at Holy Mass, that you
might better love and unite yourself with Jesus as He offers Himself to the
Father for you, and when He gives Himself to you for the Father;
for that teaching and that offer of Christ, inflaming your personal response
and commitment, are the whole substance of salvation.
The words used in the offertory at Mass … bread and wine which earth has
given and human hands have made … show that our whole life and
work, that is our whole being, is meant to be involved. The offertory is
the time when we willingly and quite deliberately offer ourselves in and with
Jesus to the Father, so that we too, just as the bread and wine become the Body
and Blood of Christ, may be transformed ever more completely into living
members of Christ’s Body, loving temples of His most Holy Spirit, and children
of God’s heavenly and eternal family.
What therefore, precisely, is salvation, the ‘work of our
redemption’? Look at our Gospel reading:
Moved with
pity, Jesus stretched out His hand, touched the kneeling leper and said to him,
‘Be made clean’.
For the Jewish leaders, those public figures – Temple priests and
Pharisee sect – figures regarded as learned and feared as powerful by the
ordinary people -- leprosy was generally considered to be a sign of God’s
punishment; and so, for them, those pathetic words the afflicted had to
endlessly and loudly proclaim, ‘Unclean, unclean’, were most necessary, not
only to protect others against the degrading, flesh-eating sickness as God
intended, but also to protect ‘devout’ Israelites from incurring the
contamination of legal and liturgical uncleanness as determined by and
specified in a multiplicity of special traditions and pious practices.
By what miraculous power or process did Jesus use to heal this
particular courageous victim at His feet? By the miracle of
love! God’s divine love for us!! And indeed, the Greek verb
translated ‘touched’:
Moved with
pity, He stretched out His hand, and touched him,
can also mean ‘embraced’; Jesus may, indeed, have actually embraced
him!!
Saying, I do will it. Be made clean.
What really, ‘substantially’, happened at that very moment, on that day,
was that Jesus for our better understanding and appreciation of His future
human life and destiny, in a symbolical, but also very real, way took the man’s
leprosy onto Himself, in so far as the leper who had previously been
obliged to dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp, was made clean,
whereas Jesus, we are told in the Gospel reading, after His healing
gesture, was obliged to:
Remain outside in deserted places, because, the man spread the report abroad
so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly.
Ultimately, of course, and most literally, Jesus would – by suffering
as a man in His human flesh -- take our
death upon Himself, to lift from off our shoulders the curse of our
sinfulness; and rising as a man in His human flesh, raise us up
with Himself to a new possibility and experience of transfigured life.
Today, in our very sick and tormented world, we are the hands whereby
Jesus is able to ‘touch’ sick, wounded, and needy humanity … and such contact
is established whenever we try to do what Paul advised:
Do everything for the glory of God, avoid giving offence.
However, we should never be under any illusion that we can glorify God in our own way, however well-intentioned – for example, some priests have thought that
their personal popularity as a priest, might ‘brush off’, as it were, on to
Jesus Himself!! At the very best, we are
but the hands whereby Jesus contacts men today, it is still His divine
love and Personality which alone can make such contact salutary. Our vocation and glory is to be in tune
with the Spirit of Jesus that He might gradually form us in Jesus and guide
us along His ways of humble and loving, selfless, obedience to Jesus’ teaching
in Mother Church and to His, the Holy Spirit’s call and inspiration.
In total ‘opposition’ to modern popular thinking, we – as individual
disciples of and witnesses to Jesus -- need to learn more and more to forget human rights accorded by men, in favour of Jesus’ need for selfless,
transparent, and patient contacts with humanity today … and that is St. Paul’s
prayer for us today:
Avoid giving offence whether to the Jews or Greeks or the Church of God.
How many however, grasp human rights accorded by men to attack, or disregard
Mother Church’s teaching! How many politically embrace such rights while
denying the testimony of their own conscience; or pretend that such rights allow
and promote the truest and fullest exposition and understanding of love!!
Jesus responded, "Well did Isaiah
prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written: 'This people honours Me with
their lips, but their hearts are far from Me; in vain do they worship Me,
teaching as doctrines human precepts.' You disregard God's commandment but
cling to human tradition.” (Mark
7:6-8)
